Graduation daze

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From now on, anyone planning a college
commencement will have to consider the
Chris Hedges problem.

Hedges is an antiwar
activist and New York Times reporter who
gave an unusually grating antiwar speech
May 17 at the Rockford College
commencement in Illinois.

Few speakers
aggravate a crowd as quickly as Hedges did
in his 18-minute speech. Some in the
audience turned their backs on him. Others booed, screamed at Hedges, or
blew foghorns. A few rushed up the aisle to protest, and one new graduate
threw his cap and gown onto the stage. Twice, somebody in the audience
pulled the plug on his microphone. The mike was replugged, but Hedges never
finished his speech. The tumult was too great, and the college president told
him to "wrap it up."

Booing is something I approve of. Pulling the plug was
wrong. So was not letting Hedges finish. But the whole event was a fiasco.

What is the lesson
here? Is it (a) that
colleges should not
impose controversial
speakers on a captive
audience? Or is it (b)
that controversial
speakers are fine, but
there are rules--they
have to be graceful and
nonincendiary, and
remember that they are
a minor act on a
program about student
success.

I vote for (b). If we want
to avoid the conventional graduation day blather (climb every mountain and
today is the first day of the rest of your life), it is best to invite a speaker who
stands for something and carries the message that conviction is important.
But Hedges violated all the civility rules of (b). He hectored the audience,
almost bludgeoning the listeners with America-is-evil rhetoric. The speech
sounded like a weary and overbearing parent lecturing a backward child. (To
hear an audio track of the speech, go to the Internet site of the Rockford
Register Star.)

Remember the grads. JWR's James Lileks nailed the civility issue perfectly. There's nothing wrong with
an antiwar commencement speech, he wrote, "but such a speech needs to
PERSUADE. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a
joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads."

Right. But Hedges never once mentioned the grads or the college, offered no
jokes, no pleasantries, no acknowledgment that parents and students of
goodwill might have room to disagree with his speech. His opening line was "I
want to speak to you today about war and empire." Instead of trying to
persuade, he issued thunderous pronouncements: America is a violent
international pariah; the real war of liberation in Iraq is an attempt by Iraqis to
liberate themselves from U.S. occupation. America's defeat in Vietnam, he
thought, was a positive event, because it gave us a chance to ask questions
about our behavior and become a better nation.

A Williams College student wrote this to an Internet site: "I listened to that
18-minute, stale, anti-intellectual heap of contradictory crap. If part of MY
tuition had gone to pay for that smarmy S.O.B. to irrationally rant about the
country I love at MY commencement, without a word about the fact that I was,
er, graduating, I would have considered it a duty to drown him out with
insults."

Statements like this are reminders that the booing of commencement
speakers often has a lot to do with arrogance and tone. But it's also true that
students of the center and the right are less likely to remain silent and docile
about life on the leftist-dominated campus. These students have endured so
much PC indoctrination for four years that a speech filled with ideological
drivel on the last day is the last straw.

My daughter held a phone to my ear the other day. All I heard was a lot of
booing, which turned out to be a reaction of some Ithaca College students and
parents to commencement speakers Ben and Jerry, the foreign policy experts
and ice cream makers. Ben attacked war in general (he seemed to notice that
the war in Iraq was over) and called for less military spending. The students
didn't mount a major rebellion. A few new graduates walked out. There were
six or seven heated confrontations that never developed into fights, and
several students started a "Bomb France" chant to irritate the leftist ice
creamers.

Phil Donahue got some boos for urging graduates at North Carolina State to
"bring America back to basic constitutional values" and to stress civility rather
than a "trend to the sword." No big deal, just an indicator that students today,
trained at Internet speed, are inclined to react quickly to provocations, large
and small. My guess is that the booing of commencement speakers will
become a routine reaction to pomposity, gassy ideology (call it Hedgesism),
or the failure to comprehend that the day is about students. Good.